Intranspection - trolling and transphobia

The president-elect of the students’ humanist association has been forced to resign because he was accused of transphobia. He wasn’t transphobic; he was merely judged by the members of a free-thinking organization who refused to engage with free thinking.

The fact to grapple with is that some people do not have the traits of the gender to which we would normally assign them.

That gives us three options:

1. We can choose to ignore them, or regard them as dysfunctional in some way.
2. We can re-think our assignation of these strict gender categories and assign them a different category.
3. We can question the association of these strict groups of traits with gender categories.

I, Germaine Greer and this president-elect choose number 3. The trans movement chooses number 2. Bigots and idiots choose number 1. But the trans movement refuses to accept the possibility of a third option. For them, rejection of their opinion means that you must choose 1. It’s a straw man fallacy; a failure of understanding and imagination, and a refusal to engage or communicate.

                I am happy calling a trans-man a woman. I am happy for women to be macho, aggressive, passive, sporty, intellectual and so on… have any set of interests they choose. Of course, I dislike macho, aggressive people so I might still judge someone for displaying bad traits, but not because those traits become more disagreeable when your crotch is different.

                By promoting option 2, which is unnecessary if you believe in option 3, and by not acknowledging anyone who chooses only option 3, the trans movement is implicitly denying option 3. It is telling us that we should keep our strict definitions of masculinity and femininity, because that’s needed in order to let people pick the other one based on which they identify more with. That is a socially destructive thing to do: those strict straightjackets are restrictive and pointless even if you get to choose which one to wear. I’d rather be called transphobic.

                Of course, there might be a good argument for supporting option 2 as well as 3. Maybe it does add some value somehow. I don’t know, because no-one will discuss this: the debate is shut down by assuming that anyone who disagrees with the ‘2 only’ position wants option 1. 

This problem with the trans movement is just one example amongst many of what is happening in wider political debate, especially on the left of politics. There’s a stubborn insistence that there are only two categories of thought: evil, or exactly what the doctrine is. If you disagree, you’re an outright fascist or a 5^th columnist. And the growth of trolling has made this worse: trolls mimic open-minded discussion, saying provocative things to waste time or inflame their victims’ emotions. So much so that perfectly reasonable behaviour is now warned against as trolling; a bit like a religion, believers in current lefty doctrine are inoculated against improving or changing their ideas by being coerced into believing that any engagement is the devil at work. It could be a troll, but doesn’t have to be; there’s another failure of imagination.

1. Someone disagrees with you and is evil.
2. Someone agrees with you.
3. Someone disagrees with you and is right/ requires you to build on your own ideas to justify them.

Yet again, the third option isn’t acknowledged. Building on your own ideas is hard work, and if you’re a pseudo-intellectual who doesn’t have a coherent set of beliefs, being forced to explore them fully might feel worryingly difficult. I can understand that being forced to confront one’s own inadequacies when the troll isn’t being examined at all can feel unfair, but that’s the price we pay when we’re the ones to advance ideas and proposals. As long as other ideas get the same criticism, all is well.